Premiere Pro CS4 CROP feature

[CharlesLinquist]

I have been trying for hours to get Premiere Pro CS4 to do an effect with no results:

I have a video of a person giving a talk, and I want to zoom in on their face and have it fill the screen (for the whole video). I believe that I need to first CROP the video, so I went to the EFFECTS / VIDEO EFFECTS / TRANSFORM / CROP tab on the left. I see an icon by the CROP word. Clicking on that did nothing, so I dragged the icon to the timeline. That also does nothing. At one time, I did something (I can't remember what), that gave me some lines in the right-most video monitor that allowed me to pick the size of the cropped image. I can't even get back to that point. HELP!

[poisondeathray]

I have been trying for hours to get Premiere Pro CS4 to do an effect with no results:

I have a video of a person giving a talk, and I want to zoom in on their face and have it fill the screen (for the whole video). I believe that I need to first CROP the video, so I went to the EFFECTS / VIDEO EFFECTS / TRANSFORM / CROP tab on the left. I see an icon by the CROP word. Clicking on that did nothing, so I dragged the icon to the timeline. That also does nothing. At one time, I did something (I can't remember what), that gave me some lines in the right-most video monitor that allowed me to pick the size of the cropped image. I can't even get back to that point. HELP!

To simulate a zoom in , you want to scale the image up . "Crop" will cut off the sides and fill with black borders and probably isn't what you want

With the video selected, in the effects control panel, twirl down the motion menu and under scale category, you can play with the value in the hot text to see how it works

To animate it, set a keyframe by hitting the "stopwatch" button . You might set one at 100% scale at the beginning, then move the CTI (playhead) a second later then change to the scale value to , say 200%. This would scale from 100 => 200% in that 1 second period, simulating a zoom in. You can change the keyframe interpolation by right clicking the keyframes (you might want bezier curves instead of linear for example)

[CharlesLinquist]

I actually found it myself. I had to go to

WINDOW / EFFECT CONTROLS (and turn that ON with a checkmark). That gave me a new window.
I then clicked on the CROP tool in that window, and was able to resize the crop area.

I cropped the video to what I wanted, then hit the ZOOM button. That expanded it to full screen.

Problem solved!